Parlour Song (NHB Modern Plays)

By Jez Butterworth

A blackly hilarious exploration of deceit, paranoia and murderous desire, as the spirit of the Blues lands in leafy suburbia.
Demolition expert Ned lives in a nice new house on a nice new estate on the edge of the English countryside. He loves his job. Barbecues. Car-boot sales. Fitness programmes. Outwardly his life is entirely unremarkable. Not unlike his friend and neighbour Dale.
So why has he not slept a wink in six months? Why is he so terrified of his attractive wife Joy? And why is it every time he leaves on business, something else goes missing from his home?
Parlour Song was first performed by the Atlantic Theater Company, New York in February 2008, before receiving its UK premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London in 2009.
'blissfully funny... combines the comic, the erotic and the downright disconcerting with superb panache' Telegraph
'exactly captures the mundane madness beneath the bland routine of affluence' Guardian
'wickedly funny' Financial Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jun 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780012766

Jez Butterworth

Jez Butterworth is one of the UK's leading playwrights. His plays include: Mojo (Royal Court Theatre, London, 1995; West End, 2013); The Night Heron (Royal Court, 2002); The Winterling (Royal Court, 2006); Parlour Song (Atlantic Theater, New York, 2008; Almeida Theatre, London, 2009); Jerusalem (Royal Court, 2009; West End, 2010; New York, 2011); The River (Royal Court, 2012); The Ferryman (Royal Court and West End, 2017) and The Hills of California (West End, 2024). Mojo won the George Devine Award, the Olivier Award for Best Comedy and the Writers' Guild, Critics' Circle and Evening Standard Awards for Most Promising Playwright. Jerusalem won the Best Play Award at the Critics' Circle, Evening Standard and WhatsOnStage.com Awards, and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. The Ferryman won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play, and the Critics' Circle, Olivier and WhatsOnStage Awards for Best New Play, as well as the 2019 Tony Award for Best Play. His screenwriting credits include Fair Game (2010), Get On Up (2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Black Mass (2015), Spectre (2015), Ford v Ferrari (2019), and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). For TV, he created and wrote the comedy series Mammals for Amazon Studios, and created the historical fantasy drama Britannia for Sky and Amazon Prime. In 2007, he won the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2019 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Book preview

Jez Butterworth

PARLOUR SONG

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

Characters

Parlour Song

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Parlour Song was first performed by the Atlantic Theater Company, New York, on 15 February 2008, with the following cast:

The play received its European premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, on 19 March 2009, with the following cast:

Characters

NED, forty

DALE, forty

JOY, forty

England, in the late summer/autumn. In and around the small suburban new-built home of Ned and Joy.

Darkness. Silence. Spotlight on:

DALE. It started small.

Blackout.

In the air, apocalyptic visions appear: buildings, towers, skyscrapers crashing to the ground; office blocks, factories, entire community projects collapsing; histories imploding, destroyed, erased for ever, disappearing in dust as the music swells to utter darkness and silence.

NED and JOY’s house. NED. DALE. A TV. NED at the controls.

DALE. Fuck me. (Beat.) Look at that. (Shakes head.) Where are we?

NED. Leeds. A cooling tower outside Leeds.

DALE. Where were you?

NED. The Buffer Zone.

DALE. The where?

NED. You got three areas. The Designated Drop Area, or DDA. That’s the sector where the main body of the structure is primed to fall. Then you got the PDA. The Predicted Debris Area: namely the maximum area in which fragment equals S and/or debris can reasonably be expected. You calculate the height, weight, materials, foundations, weather conditions, crunch them, and you get a number. Then it’s standard safety procedure to build an eight to ten per cent comfort zone into the number. That gives you your PDA. So you’ve got the DDA, the PDA, then you got a Buffer Zone. I’m in the Buffer Zone. It’s the safe area. You’re completely safe there. Nothing’s going to hurt you in the Buffer Zone.

A surtitle appears:

‘Everything is disappearing.’

NED. Anyway, that’s all boring, technical stuff.

DALE. Boring?

NED. It’s technical –

DALE. Do you want to swap?

NED. What? No I just –

DALE. Do you want to swap jobs, Ned?

NED. No it’s just –

DALE. Okay. Please. My CV…? Just to… hang on… Since school. Kitchen porter. Skivvy. Dogsbody –

NED. Dale –

DALE. Withering period of unemployment… Australia. Back home. Disaster with Tanya. Back to my mum’s. Little Chef manager… Washing cars. Nowhere in all that did they give me a thousand tons of TNT and a fucking great big plunger and say, ‘See that factory over there… Really, and I mean really, fuck it up.’ ‘See that tower block? We don’t want one brick left standing on another… Don’t come back till you’ve fully damaged it.’ Do they have a big plunger? They do, don’t they. Big comedy. (Mimes a plunger.) They do. I knew it. I wash cars. Cars, Ned.

NED. Dale –

DALE. Kids’ cars. Wankers’ cars.

NED. How many car washes you got. Three? Four? How many do you employ? Twenty, thirty blokes.

DALE. Kosovans, Ned. Twenty or thirty Poles. You ask for a Kit Kat, they come back with the Daily Mail.

NED. You’ve built that business. That’s a good solid local –

DALE. Cars, Ned. Wankers’ cars. You have a fight with the missus. Money worries. Whoosh. Lo the heavens shake with thunder. What have I got, I’m feeling the pressure. A sponge, Ned. A squeegee. A bucket of dirty water.

NED. At the end of the day –

DALE. At the end of the day, Ned, I’ve got pruny fingers. You’ve got a thousand-foot dust cloud,